Tim Geithner drives liberals nuts. Invoke his name before certain groups, and eyes will quickly begin to roll. Dismissive comments soon follow: He’s the guy who bailed out Wall Street “arsonists” with no strings attached but wouldn’t do much to help struggling homeowners or punish the greedy bankers who crashed the economy.

“It felt like you took the arsonists off the plane and then you got them a massage and a steak dinner,” “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart said to Geithner this week. And that neatly sums up the quasi-official “Case Against Tim Geithner” often invoked by the left — the persistent feeling among progressives and ardent financial reformers that the former Treasury secretary and New York Federal Reserve chair sides more with big bankers than average Americans, a frustration that has resurfaced during Geithner’s media tour to promote his new book, “Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises.”

Many progressives argue that Geithner focused with absolute moral certainty on the need to bail out profligate banks to save the economy but balked at every chance to do anything punitive to bankers. He wouldn’t rip Wall Street bonuses publicly even when the White House asked him to, a nugget Geithner himself reveals in his book. He wouldn’t block huge payouts to executives at bailed out insurer AIG. He wouldn’t force out executives or board members or use the same kind of creative and overwhelming force to rescue homeowners that he did to rescue financial giants. And he didn’t do enough to prevent the crisis while at the New York Fed.

This is no mere relitigation of history: The same tensions between progressive and more business-friendly Democrats that Geithner’s tenure helped expose are already simmering ahead of the 2016 presidential race. And dissatisfaction with the bailout and its aftermath is often cited for possible low Democratic turnout in the 2014 midterms.

The outcome of these debates over how to handle Wall Street will help shape the balance of power within the Democratic Party for years to come.

“The fallout from that period will play a role in 2014, but the real impact will come in 2016 when the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton or whoever else, will have to make some serious judgments on the Obama years,” said Mike Konczal of the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute. “People will have to make a call about whether Obama and his administration, including Geithner, did enough to reform Wall Street and boost the economy or should have done much more in very different ways.”

Geithner readily concedes that the optics of his actions weren’t good — but he says the alternatives were even worse.

“It was messy. It wasn’t perfect. And it seemed deeply unfair, because paradoxically, in a panic, to rescue people from the risk of mass unemployment, you’re going to be doing things that look like you’re helping the arsonists,” Geithner told POLITICO. “It is just inescapable. And it feels terrible. And we hated doing it. But the alternative would have been much more unfair to the innocent victims of the crises.”

Those who served alongside Geithner are also riding to his defense, saying critics outside the government do not realize just how close to a new Great Depression we came. And they say people completely misunderstand Geithner’s persistent reluctance to mete out what he calls “Old Testament” justice to profligate bankers.

“Tim came in knowing there was likely zero intersection between what was necessary to stem the crisis and what was politically popular and that he simply could not let that worry him or impact his judgment,” Gene Sperling, who served as counselor to Geithner in the first years of the Obama administration, said in an interview.

Sperling in 2009 implored Geithner to force out Ken Lewis, chief executive of Bank of America, one of the messier financial institutions to receive bailout money. Geithner refused, a decision often invoked by unhappy progressives.

But Sperling said the decision had nothing to do with coddling an errant financial titan. “Sometimes progressives misinterpreted his unwillingness to call for more Old Testament Justice as him being conservative on policy, when it was really just his Eliot Ness, straight-arrow side that shied away from doing anything that seemed primarily motivated by political messaging.”

Larry Summers, who sometimes argued for more aggressive policies toward Wall Street while serving in the administration, also praised Geithner’s work and dismissed any notion of a rift between the two longtime friends. “If you look at the financial crisis that started all of this, our response looks very good compared with that of Europe, Japan or other historical episodes,” Summers said in an interview. “Any fair-minded view has to give Tim great credit for that.”

But the left still is not buying it. The criticism of Geithner is not limited to the financial crisis itself, but the choices he made afterward during the debate over sweeping financial reform. Critics suggest he balked at some of the toughest new rules, leaving progressives deeply aggravated and contributing to the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and the rise of the so-called Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party.

An entire mini-industry of Geithner opponents has sprouted. The detractors range from Neil Barofksy, who once oversaw the TARP program and posted a response to “Stress Test” on LinkedIn before the book even came out, to Sheila Bair, the former FDIC chair and regular Geithner sparring partner during the crisis. Warren treated Geithner gently in her recent book “A Fighting Chance.” But she, along with Barofsky and Bair, have elevated their own careers by casting themselves in opposition to Geithner’s approach.

“We were bailing out the financial system in order to do something to right the financial system and then reform the financial system,” said Jesse Eisinger, a prominent journalist at ProPublica who shared a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on practices that led to the financial crisis. “Instead, we essentially got the status quo and banks that are in some ways larger and more powerful.”

That opinion — which Geithner and his defenders sharply reject — is shared by many in the progressive movement. It’s often cited as among the reasons the Democratic base is disillusioned with President Barack Obama, who picked Geithner and supported his choices, and may stay home during the fall’s midterm elections, possibly handing the U.S. Senate to Republicans.

“A lot of this is displaced dissatisfaction with Obama, who is so moderate and cautious and Geithner is obviously in that mold, only seeing the political limitations and being bound by unseen constraints,” Eisinger said.

To all of this, Geithner and his many supporters and admirers say: baloney.

“The only way to protect people from mass unemployment is to step in and try to make sure you prevent the collapse and failure of the financial system,” Geithner said in the interview. “That’s the essential, necessary, moral thing to do in that context. Nothing’s possible if you don’t do that. It’s like you’re in a plane, you’re in the cockpit, and the plane’s on fire. And there’s a bunch of people who are going to die if you don’t land that plane safely.”

Geithner also addressed specific elements of the case against him made by the left, arguing that the only way to stop the AIG bonuses would have been to force the insurance giant into bankruptcy, which could have escalated the crisis in dangerously unpredictable ways.

He said efforts to aid homeowners were not as effective as the administration hoped but that the size and complexity of the problem made it extraordinarily difficult and that stopping mass unemployment by ending the financial crisis was ultimately a much more effective way to help people keep their jobs and avoid default.

He also addressed his decision in January 2009 to disregard the talking points a White House aide handed him for an appearance with Obama, in which the president planned to rip Wall Street bankers for taking huge bonuses the same year they crashed the economy.

“There’s nothing worse in public life than watching people read talking points they didn’t write, didn’t understand and have this artificiality to them,” Geithner said.

These answers have not satisfied many of his most ardent critics, who still believe he overestimates the negative impact that acting more aggressively toward the banks would have had.

These people say Geithner was too solicitous of bankers’ opinions when he was at the New York Fed, leading him to miss the magnitude of dangers building in the system. And they say he later became too quick to heed the constant warnings from bankers that the world would end if Wall Street did not get bailouts with very few stings attached.

“There is a feeling by much of the public that Geithner is out of touch and has been out of touch with all but the financial elites,” said Joshua Rosner, an analyst at independent research firm Graham Fisher & Co,. who was among the first to warn of the dangers of contagion in credit markets well before the crisis began, and who issued a stream of tweets with detailed critiques of nearly every page of Geithner’s book. “It does seem that influenced his perspective to such a degree that when he was head of the New York Fed, he appeared more interested in instilling confidence than in overseeing institutions.”

Other progressives say much of the criticism ignores Geithner’s work to push for higher taxes on the wealthy and misses how terrifying the crisis really was.

“I was on the Obama campaign at the time, and a lot of people worried that we were going to be in another Great Depression,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress. “And when you face that kind of abyss, sometimes the things you have to do that you might not want to do suddenly don’t look so bad.”

Another complicating issue in the great debate over Geithner and the financial crisis is the painful, halting nature of the economic recovery. Middle-class wages have stagnated, and a political debate has opened within the Democratic Party as well as more broadly about whether the Obama administration should have handled the crisis differently.

That’s already complicating Clinton’s potential plans to run for president in 2016. The former first lady and secretary of State has taken heat for giving highly paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and other banks and hedge fund groups. Many liberal Democrats also view her as too closely associated with Geithner’s mentors in her husband’s White House, a group that includes former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Summers.

Clinton is already moving to distance herself from that wing of the party and any association with Wall Street bailout culture — giving big speeches on economic inequality and the need to drive up wages for workers.

“Economists have documented how the share of income and wealth going to those at the very top has risen sharply over the last generation,” Clinton said in a strikingly populist speech to the New America Foundation last week that seemed like it could have come at an Occupy Wall Street rally. “Some are calling it a throwback to the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons.”

Geithner himself understands that would-be candidates like Clinton will have to separate themselves from some of actions taken during the crisis. And he still doesn’t pay much attention to things that are said and written about him.

“Because generally if you do that too much, you’ll want to go crawl under a rock, and you won’t make any decisions,” Geithner said. “Because when you make decisions, you’re going to make people unhappy.”